PSYC 480-301: Modern Young Adulthood (Fall 2016): Finding articles - beyond PsycINFO

PsycINFO is a tremendous resource, but sometimes your subject will straddle its boundaries. If you're working on neuroscientific topics, you will want to search Medline or PubMed. If it's social psychology, Sociological Abstracts is a good database to look at. General or nonsubject databases might also be useful, either for their special features (ISI Web of Science) or for the formats they cover (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Fulltext)

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Fulltext is the one-stop source for information on US and Canadian doctoral dissertations and masters theses. PQDT provides fulltext dissertations from most universities and colleges starting with 1997, and it includes many fulltext or page-image dissertations before 1997 too.

WARNING #1. Use PQDT's "Anywhere except full text - ALL" search key. It's a fulltext database and - unless you're searching for a very specific term of art or name, your results will be overwhelming. ALL searches titles and abstracts.

WARNING #2. Try to avoid reading a dissertation online: after all, these are book-length works! When looking at search results, click on "Citation/Abstract". Don't click on the dissertation title!! If the abstract looks interesting, then click on "Full text - PDF". Then click on "If you prefer, you can open with your PDF reader." to move it to Acrobat Reader.

ISI Web of Science - also known as "The citation indexes", including Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index - is all about article bibliographies. As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in PsycINFO.

Got an article you really like?

1. Find it in ISI Web of Science.
2. Look at its "Times Cited" link to see other more recent articles that have included it in their bibliographies.
3. Look at its "Related Records" to see other articles that share references in their bibliographies.

As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in PsycINFO.

Got a methodology, tool, or technique you want to see applied to your topic?

• Consult an encyclopedia or handbook for the classic publication about that methodology.
• Do a "Topic search" in ISI Web of Science, the broader the better.
• Do a "Cited Reference search" in ISI Web of Science for the classic publication. (You're looking for the classic's citation in an article bibliography.)
• Use "Search History" to combine the two searches.

When in doubt, ask for help. Cited reference searching in ISI Web of Science can be tricky.